After a month of messing about trying to get my Commando/Quad stable at 3.6GHz without success and also trying to get the quad stable at 3.6GHz on the cheap and cheerful Gigabyte P35 DS3R I gave up and went looking for a P5K Deluxe, problem is there isn't any in the country at the minute so went for the P5K Premium Black Pearl, I reckon the Deluxe and Premium are about as similar as two boards can get, hell even the bios are identical, so I hope you guys dont mind me chiming in here with an account of my adventure. Oh you do mind??? HA! tough luck I'm gonna tell you anyway!

At first I was so downhearted with my failed attempts on the Commando/DS3R that I was happy to let the Quad run at stock speeds even though I'm on watercooling, it was just nice to be able to run the PC without fear of crashing for a change. Anyways the clocker side of my personality got the better of me and after a few days poking around here at all the various P5K exploits I compiled a list of peoples working settings for 3.6 Prime stable or thereabouts, which is what I've been shooting for.

Here's the settings I used and they worked first time so I might be able to drop some of these voltages down a bit or get more adventurous.

Now, I went conservative on the RAM to keep memory issues out of the equation and I think I gave more VCore than the CPU probably needs just to make sure I could get to 3.6GH, now I've established that it can be done with this chip that I feared to be a dud at first I can concentrate on pulling those sub timings down tighter, perhaps looking at 600MHz+ and maybe even have a crack at 3.7-3.8GHz, perhaps more. I'm pretty sure I have the cooling headroom, 61c was my max with 22c ambients for small FFT's.

So, after borrowing (aka blatantly stealing) settings from you guys I managed to get Prime stable (Memtest 1.70 half an hour / 1hr blend / 1hr Small FFTs is enough for me) at 3.6GHz for the first time with my Quad G0, so I owe you all a big thanks for your work and especially to Eva for having the good sense to provide a Bios template so we can actually share these settings.

Cheers,

Maff

P.S. - Sorry I forgot to do any screenies I was too excited to finally have a decent overclock I just went crazy and cracked open a beer.

Small Update, halfhour memtest, 1hr Blend, 1hr Small FFT's max temp under load 66c. Again maybe a bit too liberal with VCore, but just wanted to make sure it could hold 3.7GHz stable on 4:5 divider... Very surprised it didn't need more NB volts because the Commando needed well over 1.6v to maintain stability at these speeds.

Small Update, halfhour memtest, 1hr Blend, 1hr Small FFT's max temp under load 66c. Again maybe a bit too liberal with VCore, but just wanted to make sure it could hold 3.7GHz stable on 4:5 divider... Very surprised it didn't need more NB volts because the Commando needed well over 1.6v to maintain stability at these speeds.

Agree about the NB. Haven't had to touch it. Board running just fine at 3.8 ghz, Memory 1000mhz 4-4-4-12 24/7. No squealing.

Compared to the DFI, I've actually been able to get work done on this board. Non stop 3d rendering, Photoshop and the occasional Battlefield, all rock solid. Oh and raid 0 no problems. A good choice in my opinion

Hi, just updated from E6600 to Q6600 this week. Think i have a good one at least vcore wise.

(all vcore = Bios setting)

I got it monday but didn't wind it up right away as my ballistix 8500 was away on rma & i was making do with a 1gb of el-cheapo 666. So i went for 3k 1:1. Having nowt much to do i started playing the only game in town , how low can my vcore be got stable at 1.1625v 6.5hrs

So when i got my ram back , unusually for me , i went to see what vcore i needed for 3.6, my 24/7 on e6600, just to establish a baselcamp. Got Occt stable last night at 1.3625v that failed prime after though about 4.5hrs. Which makes me think it was pretty close.

Am coming up to 6hrs now at 1.375v

Is there a tweak i've missed?? that would help me get stable at 1.3625v

Does CPU Voltage reference play a part, it's on auto atm. If it does why please.

I have CPU PLL at 1.6 which seems to tie in with what i've seen in this thread.

As i said earlier, i feel a bit like i've missed something. Dissapointed that i came so close with 1.3625v which failed after 4 hours prime. Since i'm relatively new to the quad go, have been looking around a bit.